Claudia Liebelt has completed her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology in Halle and currently is the research director of a project financed by the German Research Foundation. During the running time of the project she is on leave from her post as a lecturer of social anthropology at the University of Bayreuth.

Her research interests include urban anthropology, medical anthropology, transnationalism, migration and citizenship, ritual and religion, gender, global care and domestic work, as well as the anthropology of the body. The scope of her work is reflected in her publications and her teaching, which includes courses on Transnational Migration, Care Work, Gender, Anthropology of Religion, the Middle East, the Body, and Medical Anthropology. She has conducted fieldwork in Israel, Morocco, Turkey and the Philippines.

Claudia Liebelt is interested in studying the intersection between contemporary migration and pilgrimage, that is, the extent to which migrants may also be pilgrims and the extent to which pilgrimage cult are extended through migration. In her earlier work on Filipina care and domestic workers in Israel, she has shown how Filipina pilgrims followed in Jesus’ footsteps not simply topographically, but in a deeper, performative and embodied sense that encompassed not only visits of shrines and pilgrimages sites but their entire experience of living in Israel. 

Claudia’s Website at Bayreuth University:

http://www.ethnologie.uni-bayreuth.de/en/team/Liebelt_Claudia/index.html